Grammar girl here. This week I have a quick and dirty tip about hanged versus hung,

an interview about the history of apostrophes with Amin Che, the author of Bad English,

and a tidbit about Adolf Sacks, the inventor of the saxophone.

The standard quip is that curtains are hung and people are hanged.

It's not quite that cut and dried. Some of my reference books say hung isn't wrong,

just less customary when referring to past executions, and the random house on a bridged

dictionary says that hung is becoming more common, but the majority of my books agree that the

standard English past tense of hang is hanged when you're talking about dangling people from a

rope, and in other cases it's hung. It seemed a little curious to me that there'd be two past

tense forms of the word hang that differ depending on their meaning. So I did some research and found

out that in old English there were two different words for hang, hone and hung in, and the

entanglement of these words plus an old Norse word hang yarn, if I'm saying that right, is

responsible for there being two past tense forms of the word hang today. So in general the standard

quip is correct, curtains are hung and people are hanged, and that was your quick and dirty tip.

Next I have an interview with Aman Shay, the author of one of my favorite new books, Bad English.

Hi, Aman, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. Really, I just adored your book,

and in particular I want to talk about the chapter about apostrophes.

Source of never ending trouble. Right, people complaining about them today, but your books

says that people have been complaining about them for a really long time. Right, it's something that

it's a real constant. We have this idea at some point in the past, that it's a kind of utopian

period of apostrophic normalcy or something or what have you. And it's never been the case.

Ever since their introduction into the language apostrophes have kind of shifted and changed,

...